Global warming
is an increasingly contentious issue around the world. The ones
most alarmed see the stakes as immense and consequently they
fight for their view like ideological partisans and nothing else
matters more. This creates a very polarized environment for
dialogue that tends to
negate
objectivity and impartial analysis allowing panic, fear,
and others emotions to guide the debate. The partisan divide
that has emerged is an especially worrisome trend in climate
research.

To start with
let's review the main elements of
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), or in other words
human-caused global warming.

The Main Elements of Global Warming

All future climate predictions are based on computer models.

The past record of Earthís temperatures and climate can be
measured in various and often quite creative ways, from drilling
ice cores in glaciers to studying the growth patterns of tree
rings. Through a combination of efforts it's possible to gain
an incomplete idea of Earthís climate history, but we donít have
anything that can tell us what the future will be. Thatís why
researchers have turned to computer simulations to try and
predict what Earth will be like tomorrow, or two hundred years
from now. Not surprisingly the models for future climate change
have a wide variation of predicted outcomes because a simulation
is only as accurate as the input data and the mathematical
formulas being used. When you stop
and consider how comically inaccurate forecasters
are at predicting the weather even just two days into the future,
I think we can be forgiven for remaining slightly
skeptical of current climate predictions for Earth in the year
2100.

Clouds and Water Vapor -
the Missing Factor

Clouds
are excellent indicators of future weather patterns, they can
tell us if a storm is approaching or if clear skies are headed
our way. But what exactly is a cloud? A cloud is just water, in
the form of vapor or ice crystals, at variable altitude in the
atmosphere. Water is the important thing to recognize about
clouds when it comes to the global warming issue. Water has a
very high capacity for storing heat, and this is why the oceans
greatly help to moderate Earthís temperature. This also means
that water vapor in the form of clouds acts as a very potent
greenhouse gas by storing warmth. Water can store far more
thermal energy than CO2 or methane, making it far and away the
most important Ďgreenhouse gasí.

But clouds have other important
atmospheric effects as well because they can block or reflect
sunlight. Depending on the altitude clouds can reflect heat back
into space like a mirror, or they can trap it next to the
Earthís surface like a blanket. And some clouds are artificial.
Contrails are clouds produced by the crystallization of water
vapor from the engine exhaust of jet aircraft. These artificial
clouds also have an impact on climate. One fascinating result of
the September 11, 2001 attacks was the grounding of all aircraft
over the United States. This had the unintended effect of
creating an experiment that researchers could use to discern
climate changes resulting from a complete lack of jet contrails
for a short period of time. The apparent result was slightly
warmer days and slightly cooler nights, the normal night to day
temperature range having increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2
degrees Fahrenheit). [14] The dire computerized predictions of a
few degrees warming from carbon dioxide seem minor in
perspective if just jet contrails can change the climate by over
one degree Celsius!

Indeed,
clouds are such a huge force affecting Earthís climate, and with
such wide variations in potential impact, that so far no has any
clear idea how to factor them into predictions of long-term
climate change.

[A]s the latest (2007) assessment report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear clouds
and cloud behaviour constitute major unknown factors in
determining future climates: a change in almost any aspect of
clouds, such as their type, location, water content, cloud
altitude, particle size and shape, or lifetimes, affects the
degree to which clouds warm or cool the Earth. Some changes
amplify warming while others diminish it. [14]

Is it all negative?

Even if the temperature increases 1 or 2 degrees Celsius that
may not be an undesirable event! History and paleontology have
shown that life on Earth thrives during warm periods and
struggles during the cold cycles. Even if the sea level
increases because of the warmer temperatures the increase in
habitable land closer to the poles will more than compensate. Is
global warming really all negative? No, absolutely not, and this
is an important point that is quickly lost in the emotional
debate.

Warming is the effect but what is the cause?

The Earth really is getting warmer, global warming is a real and
verifiable effect, but the
substantiating details of this effect depend on the time frame
and location being measured. Even then, a warming climate is
hardly abnormal! Earthís climate has varied wildly in the past,
long before humans were around, and scientists still aren't sure
what causes the changes. Even the most charitable
climate comparisons based on geological evidence only yield
ambiguous or contradictory results. For instance,

Ashley
Ballantyne at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and
colleagues analysed 4-million-year-old Pliocene peat samples
from Ellesmere Island in the Arctic archipelago to find out what
the climate was like when the peat formed. At that time, CO2
levels are thought to have been close to current levels Ė around
390 parts per million Ė but global temperatures were around 2 to
3 įC warmer than today. It was the last warm period before
the onset of the Pleistocene glaciation, and is used by climate
researchers as a model for our future climate. [24]

Quantities of carbon dioxide gas have
increased in Earthís atmosphere, and that can reasonably be
associated with the vast quantity of fossil fuels humans have
burned over the past 150 or so years of industrialization. But
CO2 is not a strong greenhouse gas, as opposed to methane or
even water vapor, and
other natural factors are so much more powerful and widely
varied that disentangling cause and effect is truly a daunting
scientific challenge. Also there's a delay between cause and
effect when it comes to burning the fossil fuels and when the
Earth begins to warm, if indeed the two can be directly
correlated at all. Itís so early in this cycle that
researchers have to guess about the effect from the known causes
but many fear that if they downplay the potential dangers they
will do a disservice to everyone if it later turns out to be a
real problem. I contend that many climate researchers are dong
the disservice to the public by extrapolating highly
questionable future trends and turning them into predictions of
disaster that may never occur, and indeed such predictions are
distracting us from other more tangible and correctable
problems.

Where's the consensus supporting artificial global warming?

A standard
tactic in psychological manipulation is to emphatically imply
that a belief or assumption is so assuredly true that nearly
everyone agrees with it, and that anyone
extreme enough to disagree is crazy or foolish and therefore
not even worth listening to. Commercial mass-marketing
successfully uses this trick to sell their products to consumers
every day. The Artificial/Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis is being sold to the public in the
same manner, based on the erroneous assumption that all
respectable scientists and researchers unequivocally agree with
it. But this is absolutely not the case.

In
2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC)
Working Group One, a panel of experts established by the World
Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment
Programme, issued its Fourth Assessment Report. This included
predictions of dramatic increases in average world
temperatures over the next 92 years and serious harm resulting
from the predicted temperature rise. ... The 4th IPCC report
was released 10 months before it shared the Nobel Prize with
Al Gore, and that publication made it clear that there was a
consensus of 2,500 scientists across the globe who believed
that mankind was responsible for greenhouse gas
concentrations, which in turn were very likely responsible for
an increase in global temperatures.

However, just two weeks ago, Dr Arthur Robinson of the Oregon
Institute of Science and Medicine told the National Press Club
in Washington DC that more than 31,000 scientists had signed
the so-called Oregon Petition rejecting the IPCC line.

Moreover, some of those included on the IPCC's list have also
raised objections. On 12 December 2007, the US Senate released
a report from more than 400 scientists, many of whose names
were attached to the IPCC report without - they claim - their
permission. In the report, the scientists expressed a range of
views from skepticism to outright rejection of the theory of
anthropogenic global warming. [1]

What can we really do about it anyway?

The developing countries of the world are building polluting
industry like mad. China has already eclipsed the United
States in industrial pollution and CO2 emissions! China is building coal burning power plants at a
staggering rate, around one per week, all in a desperate attempt to keep up with
rapidly growing electricity demands. China has adopted the most
wasteful and polluting economic model they could find and are
well on their way to the new, I mean old, gloriously
smog-choked future of an automobile based society. Fear of
global warming has done nothing to stop this catastrophe. And
catastrophe is an understatement because it will definitely have
a negative effect on the entire planet, from pollution to
resource scarcities.

To give you an example of how AGW is misdirecting
attention away from a very tangible and correctible
pollution crisis, consider the case of the melting
glaciers. We've probably all heard the horror stories
concerning the rapidly diminishing bodies of ice in
mountains being blamed on global warming. Yet whatís
really happening actually has less to do with greenhouse
gasses and much more to do with simple soot (black carbon)
from factories and fires. Black carbon has a potent
warming effect in the atmosphere, and where it collects on
surfaces, by absorbing and retaining solar radiation
(sunlight). The melting of glaciers
in the Himalayan Mountains is largely a result of this
soot being produced in record amounts by rapidly
industrializing India and China Ė not by atmospheric
carbon dioxide.

Black carbon, which is caused by incomplete combustion,
is especially prevalent in India and China; satellite
images clearly show that its levels there have climbed
dramatically in the last few decades. The main reason
for the increase is the accelerated economic activity in
India and China over the last 20 years; top sources of
black carbon include shipping, vehicle emissions, coal
burning and inefficient stoves.
Ö

[B]lack
carbon affects precipitation and is a major factor in
triggering extreme weather in eastern India and
Bangladesh, where cyclones, hurricanes and flooding are
common. It also contributes to the decrease in rainfall
over central India. Because black carbon heats the
atmosphere, it changes the local heating profile, which
increases convection, one of the primary causes of
precipitation.
[23]

We can minimize factors like the production of
soot, but if the dominant arguments continue to be
misdirected towards carbon dioxide then reaching practical
solutions will remain elusive, if not impossible.

Even if the wealthy countries decide to significantly cut their
CO2 emissions, all the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, as
well as all the new additions from the poor and developing
countries, will continue to build up and the stuff already up
there isnít going away either. It's a legitimate
question to ask, is it really worth the massive effort to try
and stop this based on less than conclusive predictions when all
that effort may well be better directed at more immediate
problems or at least at problems that can actually be solved in
our lifetime?

Gun Smoke
(Chemical Violence)

Even worse for
restricting CO2 emissions, enormous quantities of carbon dioxide
are being produced through entirely natural causes. Huge
underground coal fires burn constantly around the world, pumping
out enormous volumes of carbon dioxide and pollution. Coal seams
catch fire from natural causes, like lightning, and can burn for
hundreds, even thousands, of years, while exacerbating
widespread problems of soot, smog and acid rain. Just one coal
fire in northern China is burning an area more than 3,000 miles
wide and almost 450 miles long. Chinese fires alone consume 120
million tons of coal every year, equivalent to the combined
annual coal production of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. [21]

Whereís the Warming?

Computer model based climate
researchers made the stunning admission in spring 2008 that
Earthís temperature will not increase for 10-20 years, and
instead may actually cool! [2]

A
recent study in the journal Nature by scientists from the
Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University,
postulates that global temperatures are unlikely to rise again
until around 2015-2020, after a decade-long leveling-off since
the 1998 recorded high. In other words, it is possible that by
2020, the world will not have warmed for over 20 years.
[1]

Why are we being compelled to
panic over this global warming mega-event thatís supposed to
occur at a perpetually postponed future date when very real
problems, such as smog and air pollution, are occurring right now and can be
realistically solved using current knowledge and technology?!

The real disaster is science in the service of ideology

Whether they realize it or not through their zeal the fact is
that many climate researchers, including respected institutions
and not just the fringe element, are flagrantly lying about
global warming because they continue to make assertions and
predictions that cannot be substantiated by any known scientific
evidence. When you read about the impending catastrophes from
global warming donít forget the mindset here: itís never
really a lie if it promotes concern over artificial global
warming. Catastrophic artificial global warming as it's
known today is like Walt Disney Ďscienceí where if you believe
in it enough it will have to come true.

A Warning
on Warming

Critics of the AGW
hypothesis are not just being isolated and marginalized anymore
they are being directly attacked and punished for their views.
If everyone that held a dissenting view on the causes of global
climate change were clearly crackpots without any credentials or
valid arguments then marginalization might be appropriate, but
that's definitely not the case this time.

This is the greatest risk we run, by polarizing and politicizing
the debate and putting all our bets on the one hypothesis that
global warming is caused by human action, if these convinced
climate researchers are later proven to be wrong it wonít just
be a few scientists with a black mark on their career but all of
science that will be condemned by the public. Similar collective
failures have already happened, most notably with predictions of
global over-population catastrophes after the year 2000, and
predictions that Earth was headed for another ice age made just
30 years ago with as much fervency as artificial global warming
is made today.

The doom and gloom catastrophist prognostications have taken on the same quality as the lunatic on the
street-corner holding up the cardboard sign exhorting us all to
read the Bible and find Jesus because the world will end
tomorrow. If the scientific community fails this time the stakes
are much, much higher because of the very way the argument has
been heated up with exaggerated rhetoric and extreme predictions
of future disaster while simultaneously being linked with
ideological causes.
And thatís really what artificial
global warming
is about. Even
worst case scenarios put 2-3 degrees in temperature increase 100
years out, far enough away that we may well have developed
technological solutions anyway.

The
issue of Artificial Global Warming (AGW) boils down to an
argument between the climatologists and the geologists.
The climatologists insist that AGW is an imminent hazard
and they have computer models and a hundred years of weather
data to prove it. Geologists say AGW is just a convenient fiction and they
have billions of years of geological history to prove it.

If global warming can be tied to
human actions then it creates a direct path to attack
large-scale industry and the rampant environmental pollution
that has gone along with it. That is the real intent of the
argument and science is just being abused to open up that path.

"Now
they are playing with some of the most powerful emotional
triggers in Western culture. They've adopted the language and
imagery of a millenarian cult. They read science in the way that
fundamentalists read religious texts: they cherry-pick the bits
that support their argument and use them to scare people.Ē
- Theologian and environmentalist Martin Palmer [22]

Pollution is a terrible problem, ironically a very tangible and
immediate one that is a direct consequence of human effort, as
opposed to global warming, but using global warming as a pretext
to cut industrial emissions and radically alter human economic
and social behavior is foolish, to put it mildly.

Artificial global warming
is the dues ex machina of the 21st century

Global warming is blamed for
just about every severe weather event that occurs now, floods,
famine, fires, and earthquakes even! The list is nearly endless
since the artificial global warming advocates can say just about
anything they want without fear of criticism because itís the
same story on every channel: 'artificial global warming proven
without doubt; everyone says so!' Just as Ďterrorismí lurks
under every rock and in every shadow to the Bush/Cheney regime,
global warming is the hidden demon responsible for every major
climate event and natural disaster.

For a
revealing look at how the fervent belief in artificial global
warming has lost scientific legitimacy to become a new religion
read Alexander Cockburnís excellent article from June 2007, with references:
Dissidents Against Dogma.

The
Achilles' heel of the computer models (which form the
cornerstone of CO2 fearmongering), is their failure to deal
with water. As vapor, it's a more important greenhouse gas
than CO2 by a factor of twenty, yet models have proven
incapable of dealing with it. The global water cycle is
complicated, with at least as much unknown as is known. Water
starts by evaporating from oceans, rivers, lakes and moist
ground, enters the atmosphere as water vapor, condenses into
clouds and precipitates as rain or snow. Each transition from
one form of water to another is influenced by temperature and
each water form has an enormous impact on global heat
processes. Clouds have a huge, inaccurately quantified cooling
effect: they reflect heat received from the sun, though how
much is unknown. Water on the Earth's surface has different
effects on retaining the sun's heat, depending on whether the
water is liquid and dark, as are the oceans, which are highly
absorbent; or ice, which is reflective; or snow, which is even
more reflective than ice. Such water cycle factors cause huge
swings in the Earth's heat balance; they interact with global
temperatures in ways that are beyond the ability of computer
climate models to predict.

The first
global warming modelers simply threw up their hands at the
complexity of the water problem and essentially left out the
atmospheric water cycle. Over time a few features of the cycle
were patched into the models, all based on unproven guesses at
the effect of increased ocean evaporation on clouds, the
effect of clouds on reflecting the sun's energy and the effect
of cloud warming on rainfall and snow. All of these "band aid"
equations are hopelessly inadequate to repair the computer
models' inability to describe the water cycle's role in
temperature.

Besides the inability to deal with
water, the other huge embarrassment facing the modelers is the
well-researched and well-established fact published in many
papers that temperature changes first and CO2 levels change
600 to 1,000 years later. Any rational person would
immediately conclude that CO2 could not possibly cause
temperature if the rise in CO2 in comes centuries after the
rise in temperature. The computer modelers as usual have an
involuted response ... - Alexander Cockburn, June 2007

Noctilucent Clouds,
A Mysterious Weather Wild Card

Particulate material in the upper
atmosphere can have a significant impact upon global weather
temperatures, but this effect has many variables, such as the
altitude and whether the location is equatorial or polar,
and this makes predictions problematic.

Noctilucent clouds are a strange
and poorly understood phenomena, thought to consist of ice
covered meteorite particles, and known to have an unquantified
impact on Earth's climate. Being highly reflective (white), and
very high altitude at 50 miles up, in large quantities they can
reflect significant heat. Indeed, it's possible that a large
meteorite storm could generate sudden weather changes

Not
only meteorite particles, but dust, and solar radiation as well,
could also be factors influencing the formation of noctilucent
clouds, and thereby affecting global temperatures by reflecting
heat and solar radiation away from the Earth.

Iridescent,
silvery blue clouds at the edge of space that may be connected
to global warming will be studied by a NASA spacecraft set to
launch on 25 April.

The [noctilucent]
clouds were first observed above polar regions in 1885 Ė
suggesting they may have been caused by the eruption of Krakatoa
two years before. But in recent years they have spread to
latitudes as low as 40į, while also growing in number and
getting brighter.

And
greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide actually help to cool
the upper atmosphere, where the clouds form. That is because
carbon dioxide, like methane and water, is an efficient radiator
of energy Ė both downwards, towards the Earth, and upwards, out
to space.

The source of
the particles that seed the clouds is also a mystery. Since the
clouds form during the local summer months, when the pole is
bathed in perpetual sunlight, one possibility is that warm air
rising above the pole could carry dust upwards from lower
atmospheric altitudes. The dust could also have a cosmic source,
however, dropping into the atmosphere from space. [7]

How many other factors that science barely knows about, or that
are completely unknown yet, can have a major influence upon
Earth's atmosphere and weather?

* * *

The Water
Vapor Factor: Underground Aquifers and Noctilucent Clouds

18.04.10 & 28.09.10 One
factor that hasnít been given due consideration in the issue of
AGW has to do with underground aquifers of water. All over the
world vast reservoirs of water, trapped underground for
thousands of years, are being pumped above ground by human
efforts where it then evaporates or drains off into the ocean.
These reserves of fresh water, many being prehistoric formations
accumulated from water seeping underground over millennia, are
being sucked out of the ground far faster than they replenish.
This most immediate serious issue this generates is simply that
in a matter of decades many of these underground water supplies,
critical to cities and their inhabitants, will be exhausted.

Yet, the trouble doesnít end
there. A secondary problem is being created here, since water
vapor is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,
and since by pumping out these aquifers faster then they
replenish we are increasing the quantity of water vapor in the
atmosphere, this action could be a major factor in raising
global, or at least localized, temperatures. This artificial
action also leads directly to higher sea levels, being blamed on
Global Warming. [26]

As an artificial force,
correcting this problem is much simpler than enacting convoluted
and inherently corrupt Ďcarbon credití schemes, or demanding
de-industrialization of civilization. Instead of pumping out
water from underground, where it often goes to farm fields and
evaporates into the atmosphere, we would instead have to focus
on recycling the water we have above ground, and perhaps even
pumping water back below to restore the previous balance between
atmospheric water vapor and subsurface.

Interestingly, this
underground issue also connects to another mystery in the upper
reaches of the atmosphere Ė noctilucent clouds. These clouds wax
and wane over a 27 day cycle, but no one has known why. One new
idea is that increased UV light from the sun may be breaking
down water molecules and, temporarily, reducing noctilucent
cloud formation. The sun is most likely responsible for the
short term variation of the clouds because it delivers an uneven
amount of UV light and takes 27 days to complete a rotation.
Second, the long term increase in noctilucent clouds may be
connected to increased levels of water vapor in the atmosphere.

Smells Like Global Warming

The Carbon Credit Scheme

Since
artificial Global Warming has all the trappings of being just
more dogma from the
Church of the Green
we should ask, is Global Warming a Sin?

In a couple
of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies
over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the
tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the
Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters
identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the
planet's rapid downward slide.

Then as
now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic
Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite
mercy of Christ, Mary and the Saints, and so the Pope could
sell indulgences, like checks. The sinners established a line
of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today
a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those
whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus
carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as
the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that
anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable
contribution to the world's present warming trend. The
greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely
oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful
contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis,
carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism
and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the
latter produced beautiful monuments. [6]

Even if
Ďcarbon creditsí would reduce global emissions of carbon
dioxide, and (falsely) assuming that CO2 is the true source of
the problem, the carbon credits scheme still has major flaws.
One of the most notable problems that both critics and
proponents of AGW have so far identified is the fact that it
isnít reducing construction of new power plants, like dams in
China. Instead, power plants that would have been built anyway
in the developing world are simply cashing in, collecting the
money, and then making consumer in the west pay for it!

At today's low market prices, those
credits would be worth some $300 million, paid to Chinese
developers and presumably billed to German electricity
customers, who by 2007 were already paying more than double
the U.S. average rate per kilowatt-hour.

Utilities from Italy's Edison to Tokyo Electric are making
similar deals for hydro-project credits in a dozen other
countries, from Peru to India to Vietnam.

Rather than reduce their own emissions, "firms in developed
countries are buying offsets that don't represent real
behavioral change, real reductions in emissions," said Wara,
the environmental law professor. [13]

Does AGW Belief Signal the Death of Science?

The rise of
Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) as a crisis issue
is at least partially the result of the increasing
specialization of scientific research, for instance climate
computer modelers mostly support AGW but geologists don't.

Iíve
already mentioned the hazards of scientific specialization in my article Science as
presently practiced is a false savior..., and unfortunately, modern science is mostly just creating a rainbow
of disjointed facts rather than the functional answers and
practical solutions that can only emerge from establishing a
valid holistic framework within which to place all these
isolated pieces. This is why we read so many contradictory news
articles on harmful foods, for instance, every research study
looks at one small thing in isolation and no one is looking at
everything taken together. By fixating on one narrow element a
researcher may be able to derive an answer but that answer may
not have any validity within the greater context!

The scientific process begins to fail when scientific research
becomes so highly specialized that scientists can no longer
communicate their results to researchers in different fields of
study, and when they cannot resolve discrepancies and
contradictory answers from across disparate fields of inquiry.

Even more serious is the loss of public support for science.
People lose confidence in the utility of the scientific process
as it becomes increasingly politicized and the answers more and
more contradictory. The higher the stakes are raised the more
contentious and ugly the debate over the direction and
conclusions become. Again this is because of the narrow focus,
as people lose perspective panic sets in and the immediate
fixation assumes fantastic importance far beyond true reality,
i.e. Ďif we donít stop global warming right now the whole
universe will explode!í Remember: the easiest way to manufacture absurdity is to separate
facts and events from surrounding context.

The
situation is not hopeless, the contemporary approach to
science can certainly change but only if problems are recognized
and addressed in time. And in this regard the clock is
definitely ticking. 25.08.07

The planet will continue to change,
adapt and evolve, with or without us. The atmosphere will
continue to change as it always has under the influence of
life and of geology. We can't control these things. We can
barely perceive them correctly. But we can take control of how
we treat each other. The best we can do for the environment
and for the planet is to learn not to let undemocratic power
structures run our lives. The best we can do is to reject
exploitation and domination and to embrace cooperation and
solidarity. The best we can do is to not trust subservient
scientists and to become active agents for change beyond
head-in-the-sand personal lifestyle choices. - David
Noble, environmental science researcher at the University of
Ottawa putting things back in perspective.

Hot
Button Earth

Goddess
Gaia

Gaia - that the
sum of all life on earth works to balance
atmospheric and environmental conditions to
optimize life conditions. This idea was
concocted by an atmospheric chemist named James
Lovelock and a microbiologist Lynn Margulis. "The Gaia Hypothesis
proposes that our planet functions as a single
organism that maintains conditions necessary for
its survival." [3] It is
said that Gaia is valid because no single living
organism on Earth could be removed and set on
another planet and it would survive on its own,
hence the whole world is connected to such an
extent that it's a single living entity. But is
this intentional or accidental?

All life evolved
next to other life, it only makes sense that
everything has developed connections! The
Gaia metaphor attempts to connect other things as
well such as the Earth atmosphere as a cell
membrane or the entire universe as a cell or a
living organism that is born grows (and
collapses?) and dies. But none of these apparent
connections can be verified empirically.
Nevertheless it stirs the imagination. In The
Beginning is an intriguing book written by
fringe science author John Gribbin in 1993. The
primary theme is how the universe and components can be seen as living organisms
and
the Gaia hypothesis figures into it quite heavily.
Ultimately it will be very difficult to know one
way or the other whether the universe itself is
actually growing, multiplying and doing all the
things that life does, so scaling it up to that
level is pretty farfetched.

More recently, Reason
magazine features a short article on Gaia which
summarizes the hypothesis fairly well, albeit to
make a rather facetious point.

According
to the Gaia hypothesis, the history of life on
Earth can be regarded as a progressive
modification of the planet's chemistry and
temperature by biological organisms acting in
ways that enhance their own flourishing. For
example, Earth's atmosphere was modified over
billions of years by photosynthetic
microorganisms from one that was predominantly
carbon dioxide and methane into its current
oxygen-rich state. This oxygen-rich atmosphere
apparently set the stage for the evolution of
multicellular life that took off in earnest
during the "Cambrian explosion" some
540 million years ago. [4]

This conveniently
ignores the fact that the atmosphere changed to
one of oxygen as a byproduct of pollution. Oxygen
emerged as the toxic byproduct of microorganism
life that went amok and created a global
pollution of unmatched proportions, even killing
off the polluters in the process! Gaia is totally
putting the cart before the horse. All organisms
function on a completely selfish basis, they want
to survive and if it means destroying other life,
competitors or just in the way, so be it. Besides
that Gaia seems like a very teleological concept
because it posits that everything is connected to
serve a long range purpose; that everything is
intentionally working together to create
something larger than any single part. Indeed
some even believe that Earth will 'reproduce'
through space colonizing humans!

It just doesn't work that way,
naturally everything individually seeks an imbalance in its own
favor but collective competition creates an equilibrium as long
as no single entity can dominate. Besides that random external
and even internal events are constantly shifting the balance.
Life just tries to fit into whatever situation arises, hence
natural selection i.e. evolution. "Molecular
biologists view life as replicating strands of
DNA that compete for survival and evolve to
optimize their survival in changing surroundings." [3]

The flaws in this
model, which is why it's called the Gaia
hypothesis and not theory, are more numerous than
that which support this contention. For instance
all evidence points to a universe that will
expand forever not re-collapsing in a reverse big
bang creating that perfect set of bookends.

The single largest
complaint lodged against the strong Gaia
hypothesis is that experiments can't be designed
to refute it (or test it at all, for that matter.)
Without going into all the details, suffice it to
say that those arguments are valid. The strong
Gaia hypothesis states that life creates
conditions on Earth to suit itself. Life created
the planet Earth, not the other way around. As we
explore the solar system and galaxies beyond, it
may one day be possible to design an experiment
to test whether life indeed manipulates planetary
processes for its own purposes or whether life is
just an evolutionary processes that occurs in
response to changes in the non-living world. [3]

Sometimes it
seems science is listening to musical notes
emanating from behind a wall while trying to
guess what the musical instrument looks like.

I think the Gaia
hypothesis is flirting with something much more
fundamental than the idea that everything is
living. Likely this has to do with the simple
fact that the universe is finite and filled, no
entity can expand without subtracting from
something else. The laws of
propagation and survival are interwoven into the
very fabric of the universe.Graphic
artist MC Escher unintentionally demonstrated
this principle in two dimensions through what he
called 'division of the plane'. "Repetition
and multiplication - two simple words. The entire
world perceivable with the senses would fall
apart into meaningless chaos if we could not
cling to these two concepts," [5] MC Escher. Also
note that within these tessellations if one
character moves the others move as well; it's
'all connected' but not in any
spiritual Gaia way, not even in a biological way,
it's just the dimensional nature of these
structures. Indeed, evolution itself can be seen
as a division of a plane, the fourth dimensional
plane of time. Only the most fit of the species
can inhabit their niche at any given moment."Over
and over again it was, and still is, a great joy
to have "found" such a motif that
repeats itself rhythmically in accordance with a
specific system and thus obeys immovable lows. It
gives one the sensation of approaching something
that is primeval and eternal," [5]

The Gaia hypothesis is not
completely flawed but it does create more fog of confusion than
it disperses. The basic idea is helpful in that it has created
an awareness that everything has consequences and that even
simple actions can generate unpredictable and pernicious
reaction over vast geographic and chronological spaces. But at
the same time it highlights its own absurdity because if
everything is in balance or seeks a balance then whatever anyone
does is of little concern because it will all just balance
itself out! "If
the Earth is indeed self-regulating, then it will
adjust to the impacts of man." [3] So why care?

Gaia is a model, it's an
attempt to understand complicated processes and
connect the dots but regardless of the origins
it has nonetheless been massively perverted and
distorted for teleological and mystical purposes.
Everyone from the new Green religion to
Anarchists have latched onto this myth of the
'Earth Mother' to justify their preordained plan
and make their violent and self-destructive
actions more palatable both to their own selves
and the cynical public. Bottom line: Gaia is garbage, it has the
stink of spiritualism and faith all over it while failing to
make anything more lucid or understandable and it doesn't make
any valid predictions. The scientific community is doing
themselves a significant strategic disservice by continuing to
debate a model that is fundamentally flawed and incapable of
verification while failing to address the misconceptions
spreading like a bad disease amongst the ill informed public.
04.08.02

Holes
in Global Warming

Where's
cause and effect with the ozone / CFC issue?
These CFCs havent been used by
industrialized nations since the mid 1990s, so use of ozone depleting chemicals
has decreased yet the Arctic ozone hole has gone
from nothing to serious threat level since they
were banned in 1996.

As temperatures fall
during Arctic winter, polar stratospheric clouds
(PSCs) [microscopic ice crystals] can form.
A complex series of chemical reactions on the
surface of PSC cloud particles frees up active
chlorine and bromine, which react with sunlight
to catalyze ozone destruction when the sun
returns in early spring. [8]

The real cause of
the ozone holes is the drop in temperature over
the poles which creates the PSC ice clouds at
temperatures around 80 below 0 C, this in
conjunction with the presence of chlorine,
bromine, and CFCs acts to break up ozone.
Antarctica usually gets this cold so the
temperatures there arent necessarily
abnormally low but the Arctic usually doesnt
stay at those levels long enough to cause ozone
depletion chemistry. But both poles have been
consistently colder over the past decade. Shouldnt
scientists be investigating why this is?
CFCs dont make the atmosphere
colder and they've been in the atmosphere for
years but only recently has ozone depletion
occurred, at least in the Arctic. So which is the
cause here the cold or the CFCs?

The answer is the
cold temperatures but the researchers study the
CFCs because it simplifies and politicizes
the issue making funding more abundant but
obscuring the true factors at work. Are
(some) scientists ignoring this because of dogmatic
heterodoxy i.e. it cant be the cold because
the earth is experiencing global warming?
I hope not, that would sure be one glaring irony
if the world freezes over while everyone is
panicked out over global warming. 23.01.00

The
Next Ice Age

It seems
profoundly egotistical and narcissistic for
humanity to believe itself so powerful that it
has the capability to alter the environment
radically enough to create total and permanent
climate change. Volcanoes are merely one example
that counters this belief; in one single blast
they spew out more chemicals, poisons and
particulate matter than carbon fuel burning could
possibly produce in decades. My point, first off,
is that natural elements are much more
significant to Earths climate. Not only
that but so many factors go into creating our
climate that predictions are at best merely
guesses. Axial tilt, sunspots, solar activity,
geomagnetic anomalies, cosmic rays, volcanic
activity, single cell sea life, butterfly wings,
the list is endless.

[25]

Like a heartbeat, the Earth progresses
through ice-ages and warming periods with regular
frequency, as indicated by historical sea levels (more
ice on land equates to lower sea levels, and vice
versa).

The preponderance of established
physical evidence contradicts the statistically
unlikely (and egotistical) belief that our age is a
unique exception. In fact, history dictates that the Earth is headed
for another ice-age, not runaway global warming.

But thatís
not to say that our climate won't change, or that it isnít
altering significantly even as I write. But with that baggage
out of the way, first consider the cyclical El Nino / La Nina
effect that are turning into a prelude to another larger cycle
called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation wherein the edges of the
Pacific basin are biased hot and cold creating unpleasant
weather patterns. And truthfully, unpleasant weather is just the
stuff we donít expect to usually happen, the biggest problem is
that humans demand that the weather stay within that narrow
statistical band of normal temperatures and average rainfall
when the climate is really a much more dynamic system, but I
digress again. The PDO is not unheard of but itís significant
enough to warrant attention.

Second, the North
Atlantic and Arctic Ocean currents are changing.
Some ice is melting in the Arctic, for whatever
reason, but the effect is to lower water
temperatures (like ice cubes in a glass of water)
and this alone or with other factors is altering
the circulation of warm water to the detriment of
the regional land masses notably Europe and
Eastern North America. This certainly helps
explain why those areas have been hit by colder
than usual winters. If these new ocean
circulation patterns hold, this part of the world
could be in for some rugged weather.

Third, the arctic air
temperatures are constantly and continually at
record cold levels. This is involved in an ozone
hole at the North Pole but the effect once again
is to chill the entire polar area. In essence
this is turning the North Pole into a copy of the
colder Antarctic twin to the south.

This
year is most unusual. Temperatures have been
consistently as low as ever recorded in the
Arctic stratosphere," says Harris. "There
have been polar stratospheric clouds since the
end of November and we are already seeing ozone
destruction. [9]

Now, when the air gets cold enough
high in the atmosphere microscopic ice crystals form, a common
event in Antarctica. These crystals act as a mirror reflecting
away large quantities of solar radiation before it enters and
heats the earth. This ice-over effect is one of the most
significant factors in starting and maintaining an ice age
because it creates a feedback mechanism. Heat is reflected away
and temperatures at the poles continue to drop creating more
atmospheric ice crystal, etc. Normally this is all mitigated by
proper temperature circulation patterns between the warm equator
land and water and the cold poles keeping ice age at bay.

If this circulation system breaks
down for long enough and the earth drifts to extremes of
temperature, very cold at poles and warmer at equator, then more
precipitation falls and snow builds up on the high altitudes and
then glaciers form. The high albedo of the white ice and snow
reflects away more heat. The current pacific weather has been
dumping unusually large amounts of snow on the mountains in
Western North America. Iím not sure if this effect is being
counter balanced by dry mountains elsewhere but some places,
like Mt. Baker in Washington state, have received record
snowfalls in recent years.

The next most
significant factor that stimulates ice-age
formation has to do with volcanic gasses and
particle being injected into the upper atmosphere
blocking out sunlight for long periods of time.
Certainly Central and South America have had a
lot of recent activity but most of it is low
level and not especially unusual - example
Quito Ecuador. Will one or more of the Andean
volcanoes blow soon?

Ice ages are the statistical norm
over Earthís recent history but the next ice age if it follows
the past pattern isnít expected for several thousand years;
although another could start anytime. Geological evidence and
ice-cores for example have shown they can form extremely rapidly
over just a few decades. Weather is one of the last strongholds
our technology canít control yet and not surprisingly it still
has an aura of power and fear associated with its unpredictable
and pitiless forces. Perhaps this explains the fervent dogma of
artificial global warming?

Stop
Global Warming

Updates

Very Cold
European Winters Due to Lack of Sunspots on Sun

When sunspot numbers are down, the Sun
emits less ultraviolet radiation. Less radiation means less
heating of Earth's atmosphere, which sparks a change in the
circulation patterns of the two lowest atmospheric levels, the
troposphere and stratosphere. Such changes lead to climatic
phenomena such as the North Atlantic Oscillation, a pattern of
atmospheric pressure variations that influences wind patterns in
the North Atlantic and weather behavior in regions in and around
Europe. [28]

All
weather is ultimately driven by the sun's energy, or lack of it,
since that's where the Earth gets all of its energy (the small
exception being radioactive thermal energy from the Earth's
core.

*
* *

Arctic Ice
Loss

By
studying driftwood and sand on Arctic islands, researchers have
found that regional ice loss was much worse a few thousand years
ago. Current rates of ice loss were previously based on
satellite measurements that only go back to 1979, but actual
evidence on the ground presents a different story, and ice loss
is not likely to be nearly as severe as previously thought.

[T]he
Greenland north coast provides valuable long-term perspective,
with the driftwood and sand on the beaches recording ice trends
that go back 10,000 years.

Between 8,000
to 5,000 years ago, when the temperatures were warmer than
today, Funder and his colleagues report, there was probably less
than 50 per cent of the summer 2007 ice coverage, which was the
lowest in 30-year satellite record.

During the pre-historic warm period, they
say, the southern limit of Greenland's year-round sea ice was
about 1,000 kilometres north of where it is today. [27]

*
* *

Judge Rules
Global Warming can be a Religion

In November 2009 a British judge, Justice Michael Burton the
same one that ruled in 2008 that Al Gore's global warming film
ĎAn Inconvenient Truthí was political and partisan, ruled that
"A belief in man-made climate change,
and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if
genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose
of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations." Therefore
it is illegal to discriminate against someone who holds such
religious or philosophical beliefs. [20]

The philosophical belief in this case is that mankind is headed
towards catastrophic climate change and that, as a result, we
are under a duty to do all that we can to live our lives so as
to mitigate or avoid that catastrophe for future generations. It
addresses the question, what are the duties that we own to the
environment and why?
- Dinah Rose, defense lawyer

The crux of the matter is the fervent belief that catastrophe is
upon us and that we must act in a specific way to avert it.
Since the apocalypse is such a horrible mental image any and all
means are suddenly justified in averting impending calamity. Yet
thereís still no real evidence of impending catastrophe from
global warming, nor that itís artificially created, or that itís
even something we can actually change! Global Warming paranoia
is intentionally being fuelled by deceptive rhetoric
intended to elicit a specific response, in other words, itís a political propaganda campaign
wearing the clothing of
environmentalism.

*
* *

Global
Warming: it's coming really ... right after the cooling

Breaking with climate-change
orthodoxy, he [Mojib
Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel
University] said NAO [North Atlantic Oscillation] cycles were
probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen
in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still
out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a
colder phase. ...

Another favourite climate nostrum
was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss
in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather
than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been
much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.

In candid mood, climate scientists
avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however.
"Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long
way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts,"
said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK. [19]

* * *

How does one pole freeze and the other melt, according to AGW?

Even though the Arctic sea is losing ice, the Antarctic is
gaining ice, a fact that seems to be a serious contradiction
for the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
"By the end of the century we expect one third of Antarctic sea
ice to disappear," says Turner. "So we're trying to understand
why it's increasing now, at a time of global warming."Once again computer models come to the rescue of AGW, generating an
unlikely (and ironic) culprit: the ozone hole! [18]

But donít panic
just yet, ten years from now it will all start melting like itís
supposed to once the ozone hole fades away. At least according to some experts interpreting
computer models of Earthís weather.

We know that the Earthís axis of rotation changes over time. If you
think about it, it seems like the simplest way to explain this
polar effect is if one pole is tilted closer to the sun and
stays there longer than it used to. The North Pole could be
getting more thermal radiation and the South Pole less ... but
then again, Iím not an expert and I donít have a computer
simulation.

* * *

Carbon cuts 'only give 50/50 chance of saving planet' is
a typical news article on global warming that manages to be both
alarmist and powerless at the same. Here are some key excerpts:

The chilling forecast from the supercomputer climate model of
the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and
Research will provide a sobering wake-up call for governments
around the world. [16]

Again, all of this evidence for anthropogenic causality is based
on computer models simulating Earthís weather and climate, yet
as we all know every computer model is only as accurate as the
data put into it and the algorithm used to produce a result;
Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO). At the same time statements like
this emphasize how AGW is inseparable from politics, indeed
everyone should be asking Ė where does politics end and science
really begin here?

But the Hadley Centre's simulation indicates that even if global
emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas causing the
warming, were to be slashed at a very high rate the chances of
holding the rise at the [2]C threshold are no better than even.
[16]

And yet, according to this, thereís really nothing we can do
about it anyway because itís practically impossible to slash
carbon dioxide to the safe levels dictated by the computer
simulations. Maybe if more people stopped breathing that would
be enough to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?!

The treaty, which is due to
replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, is widely seen as the Last
Chance Saloon for the community of nations to take effective
action against the greatest threat the world has ever faced.
[16]

I hope all the heavy breathing isnít the real source of
global warming! We know from the geological record, consisting
of voluminous evidence that doesnít require computer
simulations, that the Earth has been much warmer in the past and
life thrived. Stating that global warming is the greatest threat
the world has ever faced is totally over-the-top. A fossil of a
tropical turtle from the Cretaceous period, about 95 million
years ago, was recently discovered in the Canadian Arctic. Back
then, long before factories and cars, the temperature at the
poles averaged 57 degrees Fahrenheit! ďThe region would have felt like modern-day North Carolina.Ē
[17]

* * *

Russia,
not being tied to the same views and assumptions as in the west,
often has a different viewpoint that is often overlooked out of
arrogance or ignorance. The issue of global warming is no
exception. Some Russian assessments conclude that instead of the
anomaly of a runaway warming effect, the historically routine
ice-age is about to return.

The main flaw
in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from
only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the
evidence from the past million years -- evidence which is
essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from
paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more
credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike,
based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.
...

The graph of the Vostok ice core data
shows that the Ice Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur
within a regular cyclic
pattern, the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a
heartbeat on an electrocardiogram tracing. The Vostok data graph
also shows that changes in global CO2 levels lag behind global
temperature changes by about eight hundred years. What that
indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global
CO2 changes, and not the reverse. In other words, increasing
atmospheric CO2 is not causing global temperature to rise;
instead the natural cyclic increase in global temperature is
causing global CO2 to rise.
[15]

* * *

In June
2008 it was announced that the tropical ocean is removing much
more ozone and methane from the atmosphere than researchers and
climate modelers previously assumed. This is significant for the
global warming debate because ozone in the upper atmosphere (up
to 10 kilometers above the surface) is considered a key
greenhouse gas, and methane even more so.

Ozone is
known to be largely broken down by sunlight and water vapour.
This produces hydroxyl radicals, which in turn remove methane
from the atmosphere.

Halogens like
iodine and bromine can also help break down ozone. When the
researchers plugged the bromine and iodine values measured at
the observatory into their model they were better able to
predict the decay of ozone. The results suggested that the
halogens help create an ozone "sink", which sucks the greenhouse
gas out of the lower atmosphere.

"It has come as a surprise to find these
chemicals, not only in coastal regions with lots of iodine rich
seaweed, but also in the middle of the Atlantic ocean," says
Lewis. [10]

This is
yet more evidence that the supposedly finalized conclusion on
AGW is really far from actually being resolved, and the
complexity and volume of chemical interactions that shape
Earth's atmosphere are only in the very rudimentary stages of
accurate human understanding. 26.06.08

* * *

Another
Reason Not to Panic

Previous
assumptions on the speed of Greenland's ice sheet sliding into
the ocean are incorrect.

Many fear a positive feedback loop,
whereby the accelerating flow will bring more ice down out of
the mountains and toward warmer temperatures near sea level.
Roderik Van De Waal and colleagues at Utrecht University in the
Netherlands now say there is no evidence this will happen.
...

[T]he
acceleration was short-lived, and ice velocities usually
returned to normal within a week after the waters began
draining. Over the course of the 17 years, the flow of the ice
sheet actually decreased slightly, in some parts by as much as
10%.

"For some time, glaciologists believed that more meltwater
equaled higher ice speeds," Van de Waal says. "This would be
kind of disastrous, but apparently it is not happening."
[11]

* * *

Oceanographers Discover Huge Atlantic Carbon Sink

Once again global warming assumptions have
turned out to be incorrect after collecting and analyzing
verifiable data. Researchers were surprised to discover recently
that the Atlantic ocean has a giant carbon sink produced by the
Amazon river.

A seasonal bloom of ocean plankton
fertilised by the Amazon river pulls much more carbon dioxide
out of the atmosphere than researchers had previously
supposed. [12]

And not only that, other rivers probably produce
similar effects.

And although the Amazon is the largest
of the world's rivers, other major tropical rivers such as the
Congo and the Orinoco may have similar effects, he says Ė a
conjecture he is now aiming to test. [12]

Even with massive gaps in our understanding of
the Earthís climate and the interaction between the oceans,
rivers, and living organism, vocal global warming experts still
treat anthropogenic global warming as factual gospel! 22.07.09

Moreover, much of this carbon ends up
in long-term storage instead of being recycled quickly like
most carbon in the ocean. That's because the main
photosynthesisers are diatoms, single-celled algae that build
a heavy silica shell around their bodies. [12]

"No matter if the science (of
global warming) is all phony ... climate change (provides)
the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality
in the world."
- Christine Stewart, former Canadian minister of the
environment.